Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Flickr Pro

I like Flickr, I really do. I just don't have a lot of respect for it. It reminds me a lot of my car. My car is old, isn't much to look at and has a number of simple yet fundamental issues that could be easily addressed if someone were to take the time to actually do it. Like my car, however, Flickr is reliable and familiar. I've been using the free version for quite some time now to publish picture sets on this website. Recently, however, I decided to upgrade to Flickr Pro. Here's my reasoning:

The 100mb per month storage limit of free Flickr is not enough. My pictures are typically 5mb each which would only allow for about 20 pictures uploaded per month. The New Orleans set has over 60 pictures in them.

The cost of Flickr Pro, $24.95 per year, is a drop in the bucket for unlimited storage.

Flickr pro allows you to access your original files which means it can be used as a reliable backup solution

There are tons of third party tools that expand the Flickr experience.

Flickr Pro offers the ability to track numerous statistics related to my uploaded photos such as a counter indicating how many times a particular photo or set has been viewed.

Although the above advantages sold me on buying the Pro account, there are still some simple things Flickr can do to improve the servce:

Although I can download my original files, those files will not include any tags or descriptions I have added to them.

While storage space with a Flickr Pro account is unlimited, uploaded videos are limited to 90 seconds in length and 500MB in filesize. It would seem to me that the fine folks at Flickr could at least increase the time limit restriction. How about three minutes? Five, maybe?

The overall layout needs some work. I'd like to see a three column view option.

I wish there were a way to customize the display of photo descriptions and titles on each photo in a slideshow